Comment by spamizbad

Yeah my experience in engineering management: Very easy to be a "player coach" when the team was small, like when I had 4 direct reports. As soon as I had 9 (in an org with no TPM/product) my full time job was wearing 3 hats, and maybe 3 hours a week were spent on actual pure technical tasks (mostly scut work to unblock team members after-hours)